The Hong Kong History Podcast
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The Hong Kong History Podcast
Weekly discussions on subjects related to the history of Hong Kong.
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Defending coal
It must be obvious from what we’ve looked at so far that because of its importance to sea trade – then as now ninety per cent and more of internationa...
Using coal
To begin with in the 1840s, the almost exclusive use for coal in Hong Kong was to fuel the steam engines of ships.
William Tarrant, a very typi...
Storing coal
Because coal is bulky, tricky, dusty and unsightly stuff, storing it between its arrival in Hong Kong and it getting used was always a problem. That’s...
Shipping coal
Coal is both bulky and very messy stuff. Early steam ships – that’s until the arrival of what’s known as the triple-expansion steam engine in the 1880...
Where did the coal come from?
Britain’s huge advantage economically was its early development both of a coal industry and of a seaborne coal trade. Hong Kong’s big disadvantage is...
Suppressing pirates thanks to coal
If you go to the Hong Kong Cemetery, you can find two memorials, placed there from their original positions in Hong Kong’s streets, to British and Ame...
What really won the Opium Wars?
The answer – well, an answer – is coal. How so? Generally, the take on the British victories tends to emphasize the fairly sorry state of the Qing mil...
This sporting life
In previous episodes we’ve touched on cricket and sailing, in short, a peripheral mention of the arrival of modern, rule based organized sport in Chin...
A ferry story
You would think, given the evolution of Hong Kong’s road network – slow, slow, slow – and Hong Kong’s intricate coastline and 263 islands, that ferri...
How names tell us a story, Part 3: Ap Lei Pai is the wrong name
Bare text can only tell us so much. How many of us have ground our teeth when we’re reading a book that cries out for a map…and doesn’t have one? But,...
Hardly cricket: the wreck of the Bokhara
Wrecks were pretty commonplace in 1892 and were at best usually a nine days wonder. However, the loss of the P&O Company’s SS Bokhara was something el...
Junk dreams
Shanghai and Hong Kong have been the starting point for more ‘sail a Chinese built junk across the seas’ than anywhere else. Hans van Tillburg has ide...
How names tell us a story, Part 2: Ships with Hong Kong in the name
There are various ways of choosing to look at the past. Some of them are not very intuitive and can seem almost arbitrary. You wouldn’t imagine it, fo...
Going sailing: The crew of the Kitten
Imperialist Britain spread modern-style, rules governed, organized sport – very much the creation of a newly leisured, comparatively affluent early Vi...
The small details: Edgar Goodman RMLI
The English historian Edward Thomson once wrote of the “enormous condescension of posterity” towards those of us – overwhelmingly most of us – who are...
How names can tell us a story, Part 1: Kwok Acheong
Almost wherever you are there will be streets named after town worthies, or national eminences, or significant entities and events. Sometimes, particu...
Historians and Hong Kong: A most colonial ‘Colonial’
Over around a century and a half Hong Kong’s story has been told by professional and amateur historians. A few names became scores following the explo...
The port
In this final episode of season two Stephen Davies talks about Hong Kong as a port. He takes us through its gradual rise from after the Second World W...
Troubled times
In this episode Stephen discusses the social unrest in Hong Kong during the 1960s & 70s and follows with a look at how the issues were resolved during...
Hong Kong's fishing industry
In this episode Stephen talks through the ups and downs of the Hong Kong Fishing Industry. He also discusses the kids of boats that were being used an...
Ship breaking to container port
In episode eight Stephen explains how after the Second World War Hong Kong became a global powerhouse in ship breaking and then how that slowly transf...
After the war
In the first episode of a new series Dr Stephen Davies discusses post war Hong Kong and the challenges it faced. With the population tripling in a sho...
World War 2
In this episode Stephen takes us through the days before the Japanese invasion to a detailed account of the invasion itself and then onto a short disc...
World War 1
In this episode Stephen and DJ discuss the period leading up to the First World War, what happened in Hong Hong during the war and the period after. T...
Steamy disasters
In the fourth episode Stephen takes us through the turn of the 20th century up until World War 1. We discuss the rapid change in shipping during the p...
The blockade
Hong Kong gets over its teething pains and begins to develop as a major international port city. The scourge of piracy is brought under some sort of c...
What happened next
The story wanders on through Hong Kong’s patchy early years, when clever drafting by the Chinese side in the 1843 Supplementary Treaty of the Bogue, l...
Beginnings
We make a stab at answering ‘how come Hong Kong’, paying close if occasionally erratic attention to modern Hong Kong’s origins in British trade with C...